The Music Man

HellSpam writes "MacNETv2 interviewed a man who is claiming the title of "King of the Pirates". The man has over 900,000 songs, a collection that rivals even the iTunes music store(!). From the article:"I spent the day with a guy who spends every free moment collecting music. So far his music collection rivals Apple's iTunes Music Store, and his goal is to own a copy of every song ever recorded. Can he do it? Maybe, but you know what they say; it's the journey not the destination.""

Comments

Disconnect and motivation

[daveschroeder]

"...a man who is claiming the title of 'King of the Pirates'...and his goal is to own a copy of every song ever recorded..."

I thought there was a slight issue there.

I decided to look at the article, and somehow, he believes that downloading the music isn't illegal, but burning it to CD is.

And, also from the article, he apparently is doing this because he is on a quest to preserve all of the music of Western civilization in the event that a (presumably Panislamic) terrorist detonates a nuclear weapon in, say, downtown Chicago, precipitating a complete and devastating collapse of the economies of the US and the West, changing the face of the currently free nations in the world forever (and losing all of our music along with it).

Why or how, exactly, one individual person with consumer-grade storage and computing equipment operating out of a residence is the absolute best way to do this is not covered.

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[YrWrstNtmr]

The thing is, it's not 'his' to give away. Now, if he had purchased all 900,000 songs, that would be a different story. He'd merely be a gullible, formerly rich person, instead of a /. hero.

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[bugbread]

It is odd, but if you think in terms of conventional media, it's pretty accurate. For example, if a guy in China makes bootlegged Holywood DVDs, we call him a "pirate", but we generally don't call the person who bought the DVDs "pirates". I'm not addressing if it's wrong or right, I'd just never noticed until now that with physical objects, the producer is normally called a "pirate", the item a "pirated item", and the purchaser a "purchaser of pirated goods", but with data, both the producer and receiver are called "pirates".

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[Mr. No Skills]

He'll be OK then until he gives content to someone else. He probably should "donate" his collection to a public library somehow to get some protection and legitamacy to being a historian.

While a worthy goal, I think its somewhat an impossible task. Much recorded music is not relased in a fashion that he's going to know about it (think about a band selling homemade CDs from a stage). But, if he gets some legitamacy he might be able to get lots of people to donate recordings to him.

Brings up another interesting question: what do the RIAA members do in the way of disaster recovery and historical preservation? Seems to me they have a responsibility to this since they're reaping all the profits from us.

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[Jason Earl]

The RIAA goes after folks "distributing" their copyrighted works because that what triggers the copy protection laws in the U.S. Basically U.S. laws were designed around stopping organized crime for making and selling counterfeit copies of popular albums, books, etc. The laws assumed that expensive equipment was needed to make these copies, and that a sophisticated system of underground marketing was needed to get the copies into legitimate channels. Because of this the penalties for distributing copyrighted material illegally are very very harsh. After all, the people that used to engage in the illegal distribution of copyrighted material were the most pernicious sort of organized criminal.

These laws are seem somewhat ridiculous in an age where a 14 year-old girl with a $300 computer and a broadband connection can distribute gigabytes of copyrighted material, but that's how things work. Fortunately for filesharers the RIAA has not been keen on sending folks to prison.

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[goates]

"what do the RIAA members do in the way of disaster recovery and historical preservation?"

Of course they're backing everything up. Just wait 10-20 years when they re-release it all on whatever media or digital format we're using at that time. Then they'll reap even more profits from us.

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[surprise_audit]

what do the RIAA members do in the way of disaster recovery and historical preservation?

Perhaps they use Linus' method: "real men don't do backups - they post their code to the Internet, and let others mirror it".

No, really, the RIAA could be doing exactly that. This would explain why they haven't done what seems blindingly obvious to us - switch from CD distribution to network channels. As long as they distribute CDs at inflated prices, the P2P networks will thrive, thereby maintaining their backups copies. If they switch to a business model that kills the P2P networks, they'd have to spend enormous amounts of money archiving and preserving everything...

Ahh, if only Linus would apply for a business method patent on the "upload and mirror" backup strategy...

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[typhoonius]

While a worthy goal, I think its somewhat an impossible task.

"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." --Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales

Of course, it's an impossible goal, but I think it's one of those "shoot for the moon, land among the stars" kind of things. Mind, I think the pirate guy is a nutcase, but impossible goals aren't a bad thing necessarily.

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[daeley]

American culture is quite beautiful, rich, and storied.

The mistake is looking for it on television, movies, or radio.

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[Al Dimond]

Yes. The media is "pirated". It became "pirated" by the act of "piracy". The person performing the "piracy" (making the media "pirated") is the "pirate".

Yarrrrrr.

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[Hatta]

While a worthy goal, I think its somewhat an impossible task.

It's not really a worthy goal. If you read the article, you see he's worried about terrorists destroying all the music in the world. If we have a nuclear holocaust, what makes him think his fileserver will be spared? If he's downloading it, that means other people already have it. So there's a distributed archive of all that music already, and a distributed archive is the only kind you can expect to survive the end of life as we know it.

The hard part...

[Capt'n Hector]

The hard part isn't collecting the music. It's giving meaningful meta-data to it. iTMS doesn't just have ~900,000 songs, it has metadata for each one, including album covers.

Re:The hard part...

[ciroknight]

I hate to tell ya, but the best thing you can do is take one for the team and fill in all of the metadata you can. Then make sure you can distribute not only the metadata but the files themselves so that the great music from those eras isn't lost due to data rot.

He must be working carefully

[eltoyoboyo]

To avoid those nasty RIAA sniffers. He probably is not sharing back. Of course the article is already DOA so I could not say for sure. As long as he is not leaving Madonna or Usher albums on his share directory, he probably has been existing below the radar. Whether or not you believe what he is doing is aboveboard, you have to admire his tenacity. I wonder if he has listened to all 900,000 to see if they all are high quality and they don't have someone shouting "Eat me" dubbed right in the middle of the song.

I wonder how many songs are dups?

[vision33r]

Ever seen the same song with different file sizes, bit-rate, and versions? He's gonna have tons of dups..

Smells like bullshit

[Pope]

I read this a few days ago. Quite frankly, not only is his reasoning completely ridiculous, but his methods are also totally suspect. I'm sure his ISPs haven't noticed anything peculiar about 100% downloading, all the time?

Pending a secondary source, I call BS on this one.

Re:Smells like bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if this entire story was completely fabricated to bring hits to MacNet. I wasn't able to read the original article (Just the reposted text here at /.), but my assumption is that the interview was done by MacNet's founder John Manzione. Google his name and you'll see that he's quite an interesting character in the Mac community and has gathered his fair share of detractors... myself included.

I've met him and dealt with him in person and in my experience, he's an arrogant asshole who will do anything he can to get what he wants... lie, steal, whatever. In fact, a few computer repair shops refuse to deal with him because they've been burned... apparently he likes to return recently purchased machines with RAM missing, intentionally break older machines to have them replaced with newer ones, and use his website to try and strong arm people.

Anyway, it's an interesting story, but considering the source and the way the story unfolded... it seemed just too perfect and way too contrived.

Makes me cry

[The-Bus]

Google text-only cache of the article

From the article, this guy (or his wife) is apparently well-off (or in debt). Either way, he seems to be spending a lot of time because he's worried that "whether or not [we] know it" we are in fact "in the middle of World War 3" right now.

So not only is this guy incredibly ill-informed regarding current political events, he thinks the best use of his money and time is to spend it collecting all possible recorded music.

If he was really concerned about the state of the world, he would be doing more than sipping Grand Marnier and downloading the latest Chingy remix.

I used to play that game too

[revery]

But I quit.

There's no End Game.

Backups?

[seniorcoder]

According to a previous poster, 900,000 songs * 3MB per song = 2.7TB of storage required.

What media does he use for backups?
I estimate something like 570 blank DVDs for one backup. I would hate to think how long it would take to take a backup.

Then again, what does he use for primary storage? That's a whole load of hard disk space.
Without paying for copyright infringement lawsuits, just the cost of the disk space is already outside the hardware budget approved by my wife. Expensive hobby.

Re:Journey?

[VivianC]

Prince,

You rock! That has got to be one of the funniest things I've seen here. Sadly, most mods will be too young to see the humor. Rock on!

Re:The RIAA could make a lot of money here....

[blamanj]

Actually, this illustrates why the RIAA statistics about how much money they're losing is wrong.

I suspect a lot of people do this: Download because they can. They're pack rats and they're in it for the thrill of the hunt. There's no way they actually listent to all the music, and no way they'd ever buy the equivalent to everything they've downloaded.

So the 1 download = $1 lost revenue is completely bogus. But we knew that.

What a nutjob!

[d_jedi]

He claims to be an attorney, but thinks that anything short of burning a song on a CD and giving that CD to someone else is NOT illegal:
MacNET: I don't understand. Here you are downloading pirated music 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, yet you won't burn a song to CD for me. Why?

Doug: Because, like I said, it's illegal. I don't distribute the music, I only download it.

Nevermind that
a) downloading music is illegal, in the US at least
b) downloading music from eDonkey or BitTorrent IS distributing, and he freely admits to using such tools.

And to top it all off, he claims to be saving Western culture by pirating music! LOL!

This guy is asking to be sued. I think it's pretty likely within a few months, he'll be in court.

Amazing, though, that the ISPs haven't cut off his account..

Interesting idea of "middle class"

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, I know this said "upper middle class", but come on, this is a rich guy with too much money and time on his hands who has a rather interesting hobby. Anybody with 7 extra bedrooms, Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee and Grand Marnier to drink is NOT living a middle class lifestyle. Being an attorney, he probably also has the resources to fight the RIAA should they go after him, although as a downloader only he might well be right in concluding that they can't touch him.
Move along folks. Nothing to see here.

Interesting!

[BLKMGK]

He seems to think our way of life is doomed and that we're fighting WWIII but midway through the interview he's talking about how it's going to be a decade before everyone has "gone digital". So do we or don't we have a bright future where the world "goes digital" and we all hum along together?

Dimnishing marginal returns

[greyfeld]

The problem with collecting music in digital format is really a lack of availability. Once you have downloaded all of the Britney Spears, Bruce Springsteen, U2 and Shania Twain songs available you are left to search for much rarer objects of desire.

It probably wasn't too hard to fill several large hard drives with this drivel, but when you begin to look into other realms of music including jazz, classical, old C&W and even punk rock you hit a dead end with services like Kazaa and iTunes.

In fact, I spend much more time converting my old LP's into CD and MP3 using Soundforge 7 (yes, I own a legal copy) than I do looking online because there just isn't that much out there of real value.

If this guy was really interested in preserving music for the rest of us, he'd be out at garage sales every weekend and converting all of the Ventures surf music to MP3 for us. There is so much music out there that is not digitized that the mark he is going to make in his lifetime is like the scratches on my Eddie Cleanhead Vinson "Kidney Stew" CD converted from LP.

Oh, and these sound so much better than the label's crappy offerings once you've removed the clicks, hiss and scratches. If you've got an old record collection, get to converting. You'll be glad you did.